For the first time today, I had nicotine, in the form of gum. First I thought, “Wow, that’s powerful stuff.” Then I started thinking about addiction in general.

When I was in my twenties, I spent a lot of time in hospital, in considerable physical and mental pain. And by considerable, I mean “spent days screaming” and “some days no amount of painkillers was enough.” I also suffered from nausea. (Despite the major levels of actual pain, Ian’s rules of pain are that nausea is worse, and mental pain is worse than physical.)

Anyway, being that I was having such a swell time, I used rather a lot of Demerol and morphine. (Demerol is better, always choose Demerol, it provides a nice warm glow. Ahhhhh.)

I was concerned about addiction, but my doctor (a truly great man, and one of the only doctors I respect), said, “Take as much as you need, and if you get addicted, we’ll worry about it later.”

This attitude was, I suspect, composed in part by genuine empathy, in part by the nurses complaining about the screaming being “so tiresome,” and in part because, as I discovered later on reading my records, he didn’t think I was going to live, and there’s not much point in keeping a terminal patient from getting addicted to opiates. (Despite this, many asshole doctors refuse to give terminal patients adequate pain relief.)

But I surprised him, and screwed with the nurses’ betting pool on when I’d die, by living (Note: Said nurses’ pool is conjecture only. But if they’d had one, they should have let me place a bet!)

So I left the hospital, and yeah, I was addicted to morphine.

I stayed addicted for about three months, time in which I mostly slept, ate, and wished my parents would stop screaming at each other, or at least do it somewhere where I couldn’t hear them. Eating was probably the most important thing I did, since I’d left the hospital weighing 90 lbs, barely able to walk, and looking like Jesus right out of the desert.

As with the actual Jesus, good, honest “God Fearing Folk” treated me like a leper. Glassy-eyed and weaving around like a drunkard due to not having enough muscle mass to control lateral movement might have had something to do with it.

Or it could just be that good, honest, “God Fearing Folk” are mostly assholes to anyone who looks different.

Hard to say.

Or perhaps just impolite so say.

Anyhoo…addiction.

Morphine. Ah, morphine. Morphine is great stuff. You get super-relaxed, you don’t care about anything–including the fact that your back spasms every couple minutes and hits an inflamed, infected joint filled with liquid, causing you to scream. Great stuff, morphine.

But morphine, like all great mistresses, demands everything. Everything.

You can’t get shit done on morphine. And by shit, I mean “reading a book or playing a video game or having good sex.”

Morphine says, “You can have me, baby, or you can have everything else.”

So, eventually, I decided it was everything else. Breaking the addiction was unpleasant, but not that unpleasant. I tapered off till the only problem was I couldn’t sleep without taking morphine, then I stayed up about 40 hours before finally collapsing. Physical weakness was probably a big plus there.

Now, the problem with a lot of addictions is that they appear to allow you to keep everything, or most other things. Amphetamines give you more energy, let you work harder. Ecstasy makes you more sociable. Lower doses of opiates (a codeine addiction, say) let you squish through your life, and there are tons of more or less functioning alcoholics. My dad was an alcoholic, and he was extremely competent. Alcohol just made him a raging asshole to his family.

Most drugs have a cost: You get a few good years from amphetamines, years during which you look like a genius, then your brain fries and you’re never much good ever again. A lot of early Nazi success is based on “we’re all rocking amphetamines” and a lot of late Nazi failure is based on “this shit doesn’t work any more, and our brains are fried.”

But because a lot of drugs have their cost on the back-end, breaking the addiction is a lot harder. Cigarettes will kill you, but in the meantime they make you think better and they suppress your appetite. Alcohol, well, it relaxes you and makes you more social and it gets rid of that tight hot feeling in your gut from fear. SSRIs make you feel way better, but they really screw up your brain’s receptivity and uptake to serotonin, in ways from which you may never recover.

So even though morphine is really addictive, it has one great advantage over most other drugs: It’s honest. It says, “Baby, you can have me, or the world, but not both.”

In a way I was lucky, then: I got addicted to a drug that made its cost clear, upfront.  Most people aren’t so lucky and by the time they realize the cost, they’ve already paid most of it.

If you are ever addicted, may it be to an honest drug.

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